For years traditional telephony resellers could rely on a steady income from shifting PBXs, managing ongoing maintenance and installing upgrades when necessary. With the advent of VoIP, this market has undergone significant erosion and Avaya, BT, Lucent (to mention but a few) partners now look to alternative solutions to prop up and drive margins and revenues.
To do this, resellers must expand their solutions portfolio to offer more end-to-end IT solutions – supporting services such as cloud and colocation as well as communications and connectivity. However, for a traditional telephony reseller, there are some inherent challenges:
- Providing, installing and maintaining the infrastructure required to service other IT solutions such as UC and Cloud.
- Gaining the correct expertise to provide high-quality technical support and in-depth advice on what solutions will work best for individual customers.
To overcome these challenges, a reseller can employ new technical staff, re-train the existing team and invest in new hardware, software, licenses, etc. But that is time consuming and costly. A far simpler option is to partner with a data centre company.
A data centre partner that owns and manages its own communication infrastructure will not only have all the key technologies and expertise in place, it will also own all the necessary licenses, which can save a major headache for resellers.
But why would resellers that are still making money out of communications want to expand their solutions range? Firstly, it means they can sell more services and potentially become their customer’s sole IT partner. This leads to a huge opportunity in terms of upgrading and scaling up existing customer solutions – as well as opening up new sales markets.
It’s not just about making money. Resellers should be looking to serve their customers in the best way they possibly can and part of that process is by giving them as much choice as possible.
If a customer is interested in upgrading its PBX system to a fully-fledged unified communications suite, they may have other outstanding IT requirements, which require a more bespoke solution that just a simple communications overhaul.
Working with a data centre partner means the reseller can give their customer a range of different options, which may be more cost-effective and provide solutions to other existing issues.
Entering a data centre partnership is a major decision to undertake, so here are five top tips to help partners choose the right one:
- Make sure your data centre partner has the right technical specification to match your infrastructure needs.
- Ensure that your data centre partner’s service levels match your own
- Check that your data centre partner provides an on-site support team to ensure your customers have expert support whenever they need it
- Work with a partner that supports additional services to the ones you currently provide. For example, if you’re a telephony reseller, can your data centre partner support services such as cloud?
- Confirm that your data centre partner owns and control its infrastructure. This will give you more flexibility and valuable insight over its variety of solutions